About COM Argentina

Who we are

COM — Club de Observadores de Mariposas was born with a simple idea: bringing people closer to nature through butterfly observation.

The project began during the pandemic, growing out of a training program at the Aves Argentinas Naturalists School led by Débora Tanoni, a biologist from the Faculty of Exact and Natural Sciences at UBA. What started as a practical assignment quickly became a community of people interested in learning, observing, and protecting nature.

From the beginning, COM sought to make butterfly observation more than just species recognition — an opportunity to understand the surrounding environment, learn about life cycles, and appreciate the biodiversity we are all part of.

The community grew thanks to the generous contributions of specialists, naturalists, observers, and people who were simply curious to learn. Outings to parks, nature reserves, universities, and other green spaces were organized, along with talks, educational activities, and native plant and seed exchanges.

Why butterflies?

Butterflies are much more than beautiful animals to observe.

They are organisms particularly sensitive to environmental changes. Their survival depends, among other things, on the presence of the plants they need during their caterpillar stage. When those plants disappear due to habitat loss, pollution, pruning, or the introduction of exotic species, the continuity of many butterfly species is also put at risk.

They are also part of a complex network of ecological relationships: they participate in pollination, serve as food for other animals, and contribute to ecosystem balance.

That is why learning to observe butterflies is also learning to observe our environment.

"It is very important to raise awareness, care for, and learn to love butterflies — because if they become extinct, it will affect us humans too."

From a club to an open platform

Over time, that community of observers evolved into a new stage.

COM Argentina seeks to bring that spirit of observation and participation to an open biodiversity platform, where anyone can record what they find in nature, learn to identify species, and share their observations with others.

Along this journey, we found in COM a project that served as a fundamental reference. Its public repository and the templates developed by its creator, Artemio Padilla, provided us with a foundation upon which to build and adapt our own platform for COM Argentina.

We want to especially express our gratitude to Artemio Padilla for making the COM repository public and for allowing us to use it as a reference and template for our project. We deeply value the opportunity to learn from work that was shared openly, which allowed us to move forward in the development of our own proposal.

For this reason, COM Argentina publicly recognizes and thanks the work of COM, incorporating a direct link to rastrum.org so that those who visit our platform can also discover the project that served as our inspiration and technological base.

Technology is a tool, not the goal.

We use photography, artificial intelligence, maps, data, and community knowledge to make biodiversity observation more accessible and useful. But behind every record there is something far more important: a person who went out to look, learned something, and decided to share it.

Our goal is not just to create a website, but to build an open community around nature observation, where every observation can become knowledge, and where shared knowledge can contribute to valuing and conserving our biodiversity.

Our mission

We want to help build an ever-larger community of people capable of observing, learning about, valuing, and protecting the biodiversity of Argentina.

We believe conservation also begins with something as simple as stopping in front of a butterfly and asking:

Because when we know nature, we begin to value it. And when we value it, we have more reasons to protect it.

COM Argentina is an open community for observers, naturalists, scientists, educators, photographers, and anyone who wants to learn about biodiversity and help conserve it.